Surviving the Social Media Apocalypse: Blogger Edition

As of yesterday, both Instagram and Facebook were down for hours on end for many users around the world.

As a blogger who uses Instagram as a tool to promote my content, I spent much of that day wondering if I would ever be able to log back into my account ever again.

Then it hit me:

Why do I have all my eggs in one basket?

I’ve spent so much time dedicated to posting content on Instagram and Facebook that I neglected building up other social media platforms such as Pinterest and Twitter.

Each social platform has its own beauty to it and is essential for bloggers, no matter the niche. I rediscovered the joy of having a real-time conversation via Twitter with my followers (I also gained a lot of followers on my Twitter because the rest of the internet was there). And I learned to utilize Pinterest as a search engine for visual content that could ultimately link back to ANY of my platforms.

And let’s not forget the almighty self-hosted website, such as the wonderful blog post you’re currently reading here at aliecebrown.com

While social media is great and all, it really upsets me as a creator to see these newer or super famous “bloggers” only operate through Instagram and not an actual website of your own. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but if you’re going to call yourself a blogger, please at least have a website (doesn’t need to be self-hosted, I used the free WordPress platform for years before recently upgrading) to back it up.

Not only does owning your own website create a new platform for you to share content, but you actually own your content too, which is super important.

Let’s say that one day (god forbid) Instagram decides to just vanish completely. If you’re me, you just lost 2+ years of hard work plus over 3,000 followers that you’ve networked your ass off to gain.

Once you post content on social media and not your own personal website/blog, that content is not only up for fair use but additionally you don’t fully own the content anymore either. So just imagine losing content that you worked REALLY hard on, despite the fact that you only partially own it.

This is why having a blog is critical for content creators. Even though I’m a smaller blogger (who frankly only posts a few times a month, but I’m not here to expose myself haha), using social media to upload content can only do so much, which is why I always try to keep my blog updated.

Plus I find my content to be more raw and engaging in a physical blog post, whereas social media comments can be really shallow (appearance-based) or just seemingly robotic with comments such as “great post” or “nice shot”. But also writing an engaging and hopefully entertaining post takes lots of time for revision and editing, so there are definitely pros and cons to different types of content sharing platforms.

Personally, having my own website is more fulfilling to me than growing any social media account and I really hope that this sentiment never changes. I guess we should all take this as a lesson to not prioritize one platform over another.